Keywhiz vs Vault: What are the differences?

Keywhiz vs Vault

Keywhiz and Vault are both popular tools used for secret management in the field of information security. While they serve a similar purpose, there are several key differences that distinguish them.

1. Architecture: Keywhiz is a centralized secret management system, where secrets are stored on a central server and clients retrieve them when needed. On the other hand, Vault follows a distributed architecture, where secrets are securely distributed across multiple servers. This distributed approach provides higher availability and fault tolerance.

2. Security Model: Keywhiz primarily uses asymmetric encryption for securing secrets, where the server encrypts secrets and clients can decrypt them using their private keys. In contrast, Vault utilizes a combination of symmetric and asymmetric encryption. It dynamically generates encryption keys for each secret and encrypts them using symmetric encryption, and stores these encryption keys using asymmetric encryption.

3. Scaling: When it comes to scaling, Keywhiz has some limitations. It is designed for smaller deployments and may face difficulties in managing a large number of secrets. On the other hand, Vault is highly scalable and can handle large-scale deployments effectively. It uses a sharding technique to distribute secrets across multiple instances, ensuring efficient scaling.

4. Authentication: Keywhiz supports only a limited set of authentication methods, such as TLS client certificate authentication and username/password authentication. Vault, on the other hand, offers a wide range of authentication options, including tokens, LDAP, GitHub, AWS IAM, and more. This flexibility allows organizations to integrate Vault seamlessly into their existing authentication infrastructure.

5. Auditing and Monitoring: Keywhiz lacks comprehensive auditing and monitoring capabilities. Although it provides basic logging functionalities, more advanced auditing features are missing. In comparison, Vault offers robust auditing and monitoring features, including detailed logging, audit trails, and integration with external monitoring services.

6. Secret Storage: Keywhiz stores secrets in a database backend, which can be a potential single point of failure. Vault, on the other hand, supports various storage backends, including disk, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and cloud providers like AWS S3. This flexibility allows organizations to choose a storage backend that meets their specific requirements in terms of performance, security, and scalability.

In summary, Keywhiz and Vault differ in terms of architecture, security model, scaling capabilities, authentication options, auditing capabilities, and secret storage options. Choosing between them depends on the specific needs and requirements of an organization's secret management infrastructure.